Nanoscale optics is the study of interactions of electromagnetic radiation, in particular the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that contains visible light (between ultraviolet and infrared), with matter structured into units of nanoscale dimensions (under approximately one micrometer). Nanoscale optics has numerous applications in optical technologies such as nanolithography, high-density optical data storage, photochemistry on the nano scale, solar cells, materials imaging and surface modification with subwavelength lateral resolution, local linear and nonlinear spectroscopy of biological and solid-state structures, quantum computing, quantum communication and optical networking.
Prior art systems do not permit control of visible light in nanometer-sized structures. For example, plasmonics, an emerging branch of photonics that uses nanostructured materials to attempt to control light on the nanometer scale using plasma surface waves, offers more restricted scale light manipulation.
Prior art attempts to manufacture solar cells using optical rectifying antennae (rectennae) have had difficulties in achieving large-scale metallic nanostructures at low cost. Recently, multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) were reported to behave like optical antennae that receive and transmit visible light incident upon them. These nanostructures with well aligned growth orientation were shown to be highly metallic. MWCNTs can also be fabricated at low cost in large scale on most conductive or semiconductive substrates by the well-established plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) method without using expensive and time-consuming state-of-the-art technologies, such as electron-beam lithography, which are unscalable but still inevitably being used by most other experimental approaches in this field. Thus, there is a need in the art to create a new class of very efficient, and low cost nanoscale cometal structures for numerous applications.